HENKE2103U English - Free topic C: LITERATURE AND THE BRAIN ‘Narrative, Reader Response and the Brain’ and ‘(Ad)dressing the Wound: Trauma and Literature’

This module consists of two thematically related courses in as far as they are both, each in their own way, concerned with literature and neuroscience. Students are encouraged to begin their reading of the literary texts to be studied before semester start. Final reading lists will be available in August 2021.

Narrative, Reader Response and the Brain (IBS)

What happens when we read? Why do we feel real emotions at things we know are fictional? How can mere signs on the page or images on celluloid strips move us to tears? How can our bodies remain comfortably reclined in the velvet armchair at the cinema while in our minds we’re silently screaming at the protagonist not to enter the dark forest where the maniacal serial killer is waiting for her?  

When reading or watching a film, our brains are functioning differently from the way they function in ordinary life because we are not going to act on the work of art (Holland, Literature and the Brain, 2009).

In this course we will look at von Mossner’s work on ‘embodied simulation’ (2018) as a means of ‘transportation’ of the reader from reality into fiction, and drawing on reception theory and neuroscientific perspectives on the phenomenon of reading, we will study verbal narratives for instance by such writers as Cormac McCarthy, Nicole Krauss, Toni Morrison and others and look at their visual adaptations for comparison and contrast.

‘(Ad)dressing the Wound: Trauma and Literature’ (ERK)

In this course, we will discuss a selection of contemporary novels that re-explores histories of hurt and pain from approaches offered by trauma studies. As is well-known from trauma theory, trauma is an ‘unclaimed experience’ (cf. Cathy Caruth, 1996) and traumatic memory cannot readily be translated into narrative memory. The voicing, or representation, of trauma is always in conflict with the simultaneous urge in the traumatised individual to forget and remember. The ‘telling’ of traumatic experience annihilates order and continuity in representation and destabilises referential meaning as the traumatic impact has blocked full access to language. As a psychoanalytical approach to literary studies, trauma theory adds nuance to our understanding of the disruptive format of trauma narratives just as it informs our literary analysis with new modes of reading and ‘listening.’ We will look at how contemporary novels engage with and process traumatic experiences in the attempt to ‘represent the un-representable’ through an experimentation with genre, voice, and narrative technique.